Warnock wins re-election

The New Neo Posted on by

Of course he did. Of course he did.

Although I knew this election was going to be happening Tuesday, I couldn’t bring myself to analyze it ahead of time because a Warnock win seemed a foregone conclusion. It felt as though we’d seen this movie before.

And indeed we had – only this time it brings the Senate to 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans instead of 50/50 with a Kamala Harris tiebreaker for the Democrats.

I don’t even think fraud was needed for Warnock to win. Herschel Walker just wasn’t the candidate to beat him, and on election night 2022 when it became clear there would be a runoff it also became clear that Warnock would win it. Money had poured in to support him, in a ratio of three to one. And although McConnell’s super PAC threw in money for Walker in the runoff, it didn’t meet Warnock’s total and at any rate maybe money wasn’t the issue.

Whatever it was in Georgia that got voters out for the Kemp win in November wasn’t operating for Walker in December, despite Kemp’s endorsement. Personality? Troubling past and family members who aired it prominently? Lack of incumbency? And it seems that Warnock’s leftism didn’t trouble the voters much if at all, nor did other accusations that surfaced against him.

So, what difference does it make if the Senate is 51-49 versus 50-50 with a tiebreaker? For one thing, it would take two Democrats defecting instead of just one to stop a judge from being approved. Or, the same if they wanted to vote on the filibuster – they’d need two “nay” votes against ending the filibuster instead of one.

Of course, the GOP now has the House, which means it will be harder to pass anything – I think. The problem is that the GOP holds it by such a small margin that if (and when?) any House members decide to do that bipartisan reach-across-the-aisle thing, watch out. Whoever becomes Speaker – and for the moment I’ll assume it will be McCarthy, although he has a challenger in Andy Biggs – had better be made of sterner stuff than previous behavior indicated.

As for Biggs:

Biggs simply doesn’t have the votes to win, and there are dangers here:

Biggs…presumably has at least five votes. This puts Kevin McCarthy at a precarious 216 votes, two shy of what he needs to take possession of the Speaker’s gavel. Some fear that the five holdouts will give more moderate GOP members the chance to strike some kind of deal with Democrats that allows them to retain the speakership. All of this may just be a political ploy to force concessions from McCarthy in the new legislative session, but he only has 28 days to whip up the votes he needs.

The full House will vote for their new speaker on January 3, 2023.

Anyone else feeling a bit weary at this point? I certainly am.

Trump’s explanation

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump has attempted to explain what he meant and didn’t mean by his recent statement that caused so much controversy, about Twitter and the 2020 election. An excerpt:

“The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution. This is simply more DISINFORMATION & LIES, just like RUSSIA, RUSSIA, RUSSIA, and all of their other HOAXES & SCAMS. What I said was that when there is ‘MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION,’ as has been irrefutably proven in the 2020 Presidential Election, steps must be immediately taken to RIGHT THE WRONG. Only FOOLS would disagree with that and accept STOLEN ELECTIONS. MAGA!”

The original quote was this:

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!”

Before I try to give my take on it, I want to state that a vast number of people who detest Trump will always interpret anything he says in the worst possible light. That’s a given; he will not be treated fairly. But that’s all the more reason that he needs to be crystal clear. I don’t mean he needs to be mealy-mouthed; one can be forceful and direct and even strident and still leave oneself less open to misinterpretation (knowing of course that no matter how clear you are you will be misinterpreted, especially if you are Trump).

The problem is that Trump often fails to do that, which leaves the door wide open for his enemies. For the statements of Trump’s under discussion here, even many of his friends and previous supporters interpreted his words to mean something very radical about going past the Constitution. I believe I understand his correction, which I’d paraphrase this way [phrases I’ve changed are bolded):

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? What is the proper remedy? Is there one? Because once A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude has occurred, it already has undone all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founders’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

I’m sure if Trump had said that it would have been heavily criticized as well, but I believe that at least it would have been clearer (that’s, of course, if I’m understanding his correction of what he meant).

But the horse has already left the barn. What the original statement sounded like gave his enemies a great gift. This is a longstanding problem with Trump – that his utterances or tweets are often phrased in a way that leaves him even more open to the worst interpretations by his enemies than they ordinarily would. He can say all he wants afterwards about what he really meant, but the damage is done and it turns a lot of moderates against him as well.

As for the notion that a corrupt election undoes the Constitution and the rest, I don’t think it actually does. The rules are still there, it’s the people in charge who are corrupt, and in the end rules are never anything without people of integrity to administer them. No rule can ever be written that protects us utterly. Just to take one example, all of Hitler’s tyrannical power was taken though constitutional means – including the legislature’s surrender of its own power to him. The German Constitution existed, but people hollowed it out. Maybe I’m making a point that’s pedantic and not especially meaningful – a tyranny accomplished by constitutional means abrogate the meaning and intent of the constitution, if not the constitution itself. But I think it’s important to understand the difference.

If you say that the US today doesn’t align with the Founders’ vision for its functioning, you’d be correct. But that happened long before Trump ran for president. It’s been getting worse, and polls indicate that many people know it.

I’ll close with this:

On being a Democrat voter

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Richard Aubrey” asks:

…[T]he dem/lib/prog and anti-Trump folks are…..strange.

If one mentions a fact inconvenient to their views, they’ll say, “Fox” or “Trump” with the self-satisfied air of intellectual triumph. Logic and facts are meaningless…

Shrug. “Faux news”.

I’m not talking about the Swamp, the fed bureaucrats, the MSM. I’m talking about ordinary people who, in other parts of their lives, seem to handle reality reasonably well.

Not getting it. But the left can’t succeed without a sufficient number of these folks. Where do they come from and why [do] they find such ideas so satisfactory?

I’ve dealt with versions of the answer many times, but I think it bears repeating. What might be called the “ordinary” Democrat voter – as opposed to activists or politicians or pundits – doesn’t seem to me to be all that hard to understand. Maybe it’s because, up to a couple of decades ago, I used to be one. Also, it’s the description of most of the people I know; some of them are people with whom I’ve discussed politics.

I think that what is going on with the vast majority is that people they basically trust – friends, family, the MSM, pundits, and more – have told them that certain sources are unreliable and mendacious (FOX) or mendacious and downright evil (Trump). They haven’t the time or interest to listen carefully to either Fox or Trump for themselves, and a few soundbites with commentary critical of FOX or Trump or others on the right can suffice to cement the idea in their minds. After all, it seems a self-evident truth to them, something that virtually all the smart and good people also believe.

Plus, if and when they do listen to a little bit, it’s through the filter of their already-held conceptions. A mind is a difficult thing to change, and it’s satisfying and validating to cling to preconceived notions that offer a convenient excuse to do so. Joining the supposedly virtuous and good also means that you yourself are virtuous and good.

There are so many benefits it’s easy to see them.

Those on the right who say “but isn’t it obvious how evil, mendacious, and destructive the left is?” My answer is simply no. To see that, you must be paying closed attention to those very things that have already been discredited in your eyes. It’s a hurdle to overcome, and although some do, most will not.

Trump as Lear, raging against the vast left-wing conspiracy

The New Neo Posted on by

And I mean really really vast.

Many many people think that Trump’s gone past the point of no return with this quote:

“So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, the Twitter alternative that he founded.

“A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” he added. “Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections.”

First I’ll observe that in the practical sense this was a case of Trump giving his enemies the rope with which to hang him, and they have gladly obliged. After all, what has been one of the most common refrains about Trump ever since he declared his candidacy in 2015? That he is a tyrant eager to suspend the Constitution. That is the way they framed January 6th, 2021 as well. This statement by Trump feeds into all of that. So it was stupid on that level; another case of Trump losing his touch in terms of the ability to skirt the line without quite going over it.

However, I see this as a continuation of Trump’s raging King Lear mode of which I’ve written before. Think about it. Trump had the most powerful and most stressful job in the world for four years – I mean that literally. All the while, they laughed at him and/or hated him, and did their best to bring him down through any means possible. Meanwhile, he was a very successful president in terms of what he actually did in the job, surprisingly so. I cannot even imagine the stress he was under all the time, and although he sometimes showed it he did not crack.

And then he lost the 2020 election after thinking he’d won it, and after those four long years of fighting against the extremely numerous and powerful forces arrayed against him. He has never forgotten and never forgiven. With the Twitter story, we now have even more evidence of what was done to him. Whether it’s a fraudulent election in terms of manufacturing votes, or merely blocking the truth and telling lies, it was terrible and he is enraged – deeply enraged and I actually believe heartbroken.

One of the things the left does best is to accuse the right of doing what the left is actually doing. That’s where Hillary Clinton comes in (the article is from February of 2016):

The “vast, right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton warned about in the 1990’s still exists, she confirmed on Wednesday evening — but now it’s out in the open and it’s “even better funded,” she said.

Clinton was asked about that infamous quote during a televised town hall hosted by CNN in Derry, New Hampshire.

“At this point it’s probably not correct to say it’s a conspiracy because it’s out in the open,” Clinton said. “There is no doubt about who the players are, what they’re trying to achieve… It’s real, and we’re going to beat it.”

Clinton first used that line in an interview with NBC’s Today Show in 1998 when talking about the political attacks that followed President Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. “The great story here, for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it, is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president,” she said at the time.

And now there’s no question that a vast left-wing conspiracy successfully took Trump down in 2020. How can a person accept such massive injustice? Not only that, but such massive injustice with no redress?

I’ve said many times that with election fraud, it must be prevented because proving it is nearly impossible and remedying it after the fact is also impossible because there is not going to be a do-over in a presidential election. In addition, if there’s no fraud proven but only pressure by parties such as the FBI, the Constitution is mute on remedies – except impeachment and removal, which is a sort of one-size-fits-all remedy. However, those are political/legal acts of Congress requiring enormous agreement from both parties. In the current climate that will never happen to Biden, no matter what the offenses.

No wonder Trump is raging and searching for a remedy. But his questions and suggestions not only don’t provide a viable answer but tap into just about every criticism ever made of him. It has made his enemies ecstatic with glee, and I believe it shows that the years of persecution have taken their toll on him.

I’ll close with this from Lear:

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world,
Crack Nature’s moulds, all germains spill at once,
That makes ingrateful man!

The Twitter files and the smoking gun

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m in complete agreement with this from the NY Post, by Andrew C. McCarthy:

Just don’t look for a smoking gun. We’re not going to see an FBI document that says, “Tell Twitter the Biden evidence is Russian disinformation.” When the new Chief Twit, Elon Musk, released the so-called Twitter Files over the weekend, Matt Taibbi’s consequent thread of reporting observed there’s no evidence of a specific warning to social-media platforms that the Biden information was sourced to Russia or hacked. As Devine countered, however, there is significant evidence of FBI collusion in the scheme.

I can explain the apparent disconnect. It is not necessary for FBI officials to issue specific warnings to convey the message that a story should be killed.

In these schemes, there are sophisticated actors in each camp, including former government officials in media and social media. When government officials do their nod-and-a-wink routine, these execs get the hint. The higher-ups at Twitter and Facebook knew the FBI wasn’t holding regular pre-election meetings with them idly. They would also have understood that when briefing private parties the FBI can’t accuse people of specific criminal misconduct — such as espionage and hacking. So it keeps things “general” (as Taibbi described the warnings). That, along with its perceived authority, allows it to get its accusatory message across but later deny it did so.

I have long thought the same. These people are not stupid, and they are used to playing this game and quite good at it. No one is going to leave “smoking gun” evidence, nor do they need to do so in order to get the message across and get the results they want.

McCarthy ends with this (and please read the whole thing):

That’s how this game is played. The players know exactly what they’re doing. They say enough to endorse the lie but leave themselves room to deny that they did so. They think we’re idiots.

The only part with which I don’t agree – at least not exactly – is that last sentence. I would modify it this way: they think that the MSM and the Democrats will rationalize, explain away, coverup, and otherwise manage to convince a lot of people that this was all quite innocent and in fact a big nothingburger tha can be safely ignored or waved away. And that, because a great many people – maybe even most, but at any rate enough – don’t really want to focus on all this complex and sordid stuff, sorting out the wheat from the chaff and trying to figure out the truth in a sea of lies, that the approach will work to shove it all under the rug still again.

Or, alternatively, they think that enough people will realize what actually happened and yet rationalize that the ends justify the means in the worthy cause of promoting Biden and defeating Trump.

Talking points on the left: about those Twitter files and Matt Taibbi

The New Neo Posted on by

The leftist troops have been told what line to take on Matt Taibbi – who’s been reporting on the Twitter files – and here it is:

Imagine throwing it all away to do PR work for the richest person in the world. Humiliating shit.

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) December 2, 2022

The article goes on to list statement after statement, mostly by people connected to journalism in some way, using the same phrase or nearly the same phrase excoriating reporter Taibbi. Are we to believe all these people simultaneously thought of the same supposedly brilliant ad hominem bon mot? I don’t think so. One thing I’ve noticed over the years is how on-point and organized the left is in its messaging.

Taibbi is being attacked for taking on the task of summarizing the Twitter files on the banning of stories (such as the Hunter laptop) that Musk has recently released, and for that Taibbi must be destroyed if possible and certainly completely discredited. That is a given.

The recitation of the same phrase from so many sources reminds me of this, although the message is quite different:

[NOTE: There are other talking points and rationalizations as well. See Ace’s take on some them here, from the formerly “conservative” NeverTrumpers Kristol and French.]

Fasten your seatbelts

The New Neo Posted on by

I searched for the following movie clip because I was thinking of including it in a post about Trump vs. DeSantis. It didn’t quite fit, but I became fascinated with the scene for other reasons.

First of all, of course, there’s Bette Davis’ famous line about fastening your seatbelts. Boy, they don’t make them like Davis anymore. Then there’s Marilyn Monroe in a bit part, upstaging just about everyone by just standing there and saying a few lines.

But the thing that really got me were the fashions. They took me back – boy, did they take me back! The movie was made in 1950, and I doubt I remember fashions from that year, but the styles were popular for a few more years, and very similar to what my mother used to wear to parties. So elegant and stylized. I think it was called “The New Look,” when after WWII there was suddenly a lot more material available for clothing and skirts got longer. And the jewelry! My mother had a pin something like the one on Davis’ dress here (my mother smoked, too, although unlike Davis she quit when she was in her 40s), and also had two matching rhinestone clips like the ones the woman in the background on the right is wearing at 0:38 to 0:43. I still have those two clips, although I have never worn them. And here they are:

I don’t have a dress that they would work well with. Actually, I don’t have any dressy cocktail-party type occasions anymore, nor did I ever have all that many to begin with (sigh).

And let me add that the moment I downloaded that photo to my computer, up popped an ad for costume jewelry.

Here’s the movie scene:

ADDENDUM:

For the curious:

I’ll add that I just noticed that my dress clips are slightly asymmetrical.

With the Biden administration, the left has pulled the mask off

The New Neo Posted on by

During his administration, Obama was careful to keep his leftist core under control except to those with discerning eyes. Obama carefully calibrated his movements to the left and never went too much further than the public could accept with the help of the ever-thoughtful MSM. Plus there was his seemingly erudite and thoughtful manner of speaking – and even his baritone voice itself – which soothed people into thinking he was not especially radical. The “change” of which he spoke was vaguely-defined. The assumption on the part of many was that, whatever the change was, it would be something great.

But with Biden there’s none of that. His persona is strange and his rhetoric vacant, mendacious, unintelligible, and/or openly vicious. There’s also the destructiveness of his advisors and appointees. My sense is that the left has allowed itself to get so bold as a direct result of changes that occurred during the Obama administration. First, they made certain that agencies such as the DOJ and FBI were wholly occupied by the partisan left. Second, the advent of leftist-led social media gave them an extra lever of control. Third, the Overton window was shifted substantially to the left, step by step. Fourth, the takeoever of the MSM was substantially complete. Fifth, the campaign against voting laws that helped to prevent fraud – such as voter ID – successfully made use of the “racist” accusation. Sixth, Obama himself furthered an increasingly successful drive (begun long before Obama, but perfected by him) to make “racist” a charge that more and more people associated with the right in general and just about everything it did or advocated. Since then, the label of “terrorist” has also been successfully applied to much of the right, via the persecution/prosecution of the Whitmer kidnapping defendants and especially the January 6th demonstrators.

It’s obvious that our present government can correctly be labeled as leftist, and that they no longer seem to care or to be afraid of that label. And if there also has been successful voting fraud, it would give them a further sense of invulnerability.

The left circles the wagons on the Twitter censorship story

The New Neo Posted on by

The story about the media and Twitter coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story prior to the 2020 election in order to help elect Joe Biden is now followed by a coverup of the coverup – or excuse-making, minimization, rationalization, and/or counterattack.

This is what they do.

Here’s a typical counterattack, for example:

You can follow what Taibbi actually reported here. There will be more to come. The story is also summarized by the New York Post in this piece. Among the basics is the fact that Dorsey seems to have been more fool than knave, having been left out of the censorship-decision loop by subordinates supposedly acting on their own (at least according to the emails) to make up the “it was hacked!” story to try to justify blocking a news item they knew was not only not hacked but also true.

Of course, that was also obvious at the time, although only the right noticed. That’s an example of how very successful this approach by the left has been. A vast number of Americans either never hear the actual story, or are programmed to reject it as fake even before they learn much about it and therefore not inclined to try to learn much about it.

For me, the Hunter Biden laptop story was a turning point after many other turning points that began in my case, as best I can recall, with the Swift Vets story in the leadup to the 2004 election. I had read the Vets’ allegations in some depth and they seemed to be quite credible and very much in need of deep and objective investigation. I really thought at the time the story broke – and this was nearly twenty years ago – that most people would be alarmed by the depth of the allegations and the non-flakiness of the accusers and would want to know the truth. When I saw that not only was that not the case, but that it was the Vets who would become the villains according to the MSM and the Democrats – that the truth of the matter was not the issue, only blocking their political effect – it was deeply disillusioning.

As I said, that was a long time ago and there’s been story after story after story following the same pattern, so many that by now it’s a mountainous edifice. That’s one of the main reasons that when a person on the right and a person on the left try to talk together about politics, even if they are relatively polite and friendly to each other, there is a lack of common references that means that the person on the right knows about a ton of stories that the person on the left is either ignorant about or believes are lies. Try patiently amassing the evidence for the truth of each one; it would take years to explain and even then I doubt it would be believed.

The Hunter Biden laptop story was only one in a long long line, but for a moment – just a moment – I thought it would finally be the straw that broke the camel’s back of enough Democrat voters that it would matter in the election. Apparently the censors in social media and the MSM thought the same, and that’s why they worked so assiduously to keep the story either unknown or labeled fake. A poll after the election indicated that knowing the story would have changed the minds of a significant number of Biden voters, but after the election doesn’t matter except theoretically. Mission accomplished.

There was also a poll taken this past August indicating that, by that time, the majority of those who knew about the laptop story believed it had affected the 2020 election [emphasis mine]:

Nearly four of five Americans who’ve been following the Hunter Biden laptop scandal believe that “truthful” coverage would have changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, according to a new poll.

A similar percentage also said they’re convinced that information on the computer is real, with just 11% saying they thought it was “created by Russia,” according to the survey conducted by the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics.

Note that these findings are limited to people who were following the story. I can’t get to the poll itself, which seems to be for subscribers only, so I don’t know what percentage of people they called said they’d been following the story by that time. My guess is that most people who vote Democratic are either not following it or simply do not care what was done, as long as Biden won and Trump was defeated.

And if that hunch of mine is true, it is the reason we’re in the crisis we’re in. Too many people – and way too many in the press – are unable and/or unwilling to look at each story objectively. People have learned to look away or dismiss things that don’t fit their ideology. That’s a human tendency anyway – after all, a mind is a difficult thing to change – but it’s been encouraged and exacerbated by a press that should be seeking the truth rather than echoing partisan falsehoods.